Pride of Broadway
It’s interesting looking at The Lion King now, in the aftermath of the colossal creative implosion that was Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the most expensive Broadway musical in history and one of the worst received. The latter show’s director and coauthor Julie Taymor left that production amid massive rewrites moving away from her original concept, and she’s been in the courts with the producers over royalties and fees ever since. The Lion King was a huge triumph for director Taymor; the 1997 adaptation of the 1994 Disney flick (itself seemingly a ripoff of the animated 1960s Japanese TV show Kimba the White Lion) is the highest-grossing (and fifth longest-running) Broadway show in history and won Tony Awards for best musical, best direction (Taymor), choreography and scenic, costume (Taymor again) and lighting design. So the question is, how does it hold up now, in its 15th year?
